How To Use Event Marketing Automation to Sell More Tickets

As we’re sure you know by now, event marketing is not only crucial to getting the word out there about your upcoming event but it can also be a huge undertaking. Nailing a good event marketing strategy is hard enough, but once you’ve completed that step of the process, you then have the mammoth task of actually having to execute that plan.

While it’s certainly possible to do this all yourself or with a team (as it was for many years before this technology caught up), many modern marketers take advantage of technology to streamline this process, specifically, marketing automation tools.

What is automation for event marketing?

Event marketing automation is the process of using digital tools and platforms to help streamline your marketing communications and usually involves a combination of a contact database, analytics, email marketing management as well as a content management system. This overall combination will come together in the form of a “workflow” that can be created through the marketing automation platform of your choosing. Workflows can come in many shapes and sizes but are crucial in determining exactly what will happen at each step of your customer journey. The below example depicts a workflow for a welcome email and is one that you can prepare in advance in order to effectively deliver a relevant piece of communication to a potential attendee.

To the end-user, automation tools will make your event marketing feel a lot more personalised. All your reminder emails, follow-up texts, thank you for coming emails and social media posts can all be set up and scheduled in advance based on the actions of your attendees or the time/day you’d like to post.

How can it help streamline event marketing?

Before marketing automation tools existed, teams or individuals would have to post, email or manage all the databases themselves. Thanks to automation tools, all of these tasks can be done automatically. Below are a few ways that automation can help streamline your event marketing:

Promoting on social media

When it comes to finding attendees, one of your best bets is to promote your event on social media. To avoid all the copying and pasting involved in posting across various social platforms, you can use content management software such as Hubspot to schedule posts ahead of time. If you’re using an event management software, you have the ability to link your social channels directly so that you can share event details or messaging across multiple channels without having to do them separately.

Communicating with attendees

Attendees are going to want to know details about your event as well as reminders to attend. One of the best forms of communication with your attendees is through email, and thankfully this process can be automated via a range of platforms and tools out there, such as Mailchimp.

Without automation, you would have to import and export email addresses, segment them into certain lists and send out email blasts on the day/time you prefer, creating a lot more workload and taking time away from more important tasks.

Check out our Mailchimp integration to automatically update your Mailchimp contact records and enrich your data sets.

Customer Service

The absolute backbone of your events is, of course, your attendees. Happy attendees, happy event planner, as they say. Of course, issues or questions will arise, and when they do, they’re going to want to hear from you in a personalized way. Unfortunately, doing this manually will take up a ton of your time that could be better spent on the rest of your event planning.

Automation helps hasten this process by streamlining communications as well as creating closed social networks, in turn empowering your attendees to shape their own experience. One example of this is chatbots, which can be set up either through your own website or a social media platform such as Facebook, to answer general or frequently asked questions as well as help transfer attendees to speak with actual customer service representatives for more complicated matters.

Ultimately, event marketing automation will take away much of the day-to-day marketing work from you or your team, and free you up to focus on larger, more important tasks at hand. With marketing automation, you no longer need to send reminder or thank you emails out yourself to attendees, you can now schedule these in advance.

Examples of Event Automation

Broadway.com Welcome Emails

Automated are highly effective, leading to higher click-through rates and open rates as well as driving more revenue. At the same time, customers feel happier that they’re not just another face in the crowd since they’re receiving more relevant and personalized content.

Welcome emails are crucial as your customer/attendees first impression of you as an event organiser. Welcome emails can be one-offs or a series of emails in order to onboard them. Take Broadway.com, an online marketplace for Broadway tickets, for example. Once a user hits the ‘subscribe’ button at the bottom of their website and completes a registration form, they will immediately receive an email welcoming them to the platform alongside a valuable discount to use right away.

This is a clear example of an email being sent out at a time when it's most relevant to a potential attendee or subscriber, leading to an increased chance that they’ll open it and click through to your website or offer.

SproutSocial Post Scheduling

From a social media standpoint, scheduling posts is one of the most common forms of automation. Today, the pressure is on event organisers to post often, sometimes multiple times a day, and the pressure to do that on the exact date and time you’re aiming for is overwhelming.

With scheduling platforms such as SproutSocial and Hubspot, you can write the text and select the video or image you’d like to post ahead of time, making your life that much easier. You can also schedule posts across all your relevant social media platforms, taking away the headaches that bouncing back and forth between platforms often causes.

Sephora’s Chatbot

Chatbots are so commonplace nowadays that you’d be surprised how much you interact with them on a daily basis. Chatbots play an important role by providing immediate answers rather than having individuals wait for a business to respond directly.

In the above example, SEPHORA’s chatbot has the ability to answer basic questions or have users speak with an agent if their query is too complicated. Building a bot may sound complicated, but many tools and platforms offer guides on how to build a chatbot through their respective platforms, such as Facebook Messenger or Hubspot, so take a look at their guides and give it a crack!

How do I get started?

As a first step, you need to select an event management software (like Humanitix!) that can help take care of the day-to-day event management. This will help make sure the basics of event management and ticketing are in place before you move onto the marketing side of things.

Then, you’re going to need to use a workflow platform to help integrate your other automation tools. Zapier is one such well-known workflow platform that you can use to link an event management software to various apps to help automate your work (here’s how to use Zapier to connect various apps with the Humanitix platform).

Once you’ve set up your integrations, you'll want to explore and set up each workflow to make sure each platform is talking to each other effectively. We recommend getting started on the above and learning as you go. The quicker you begin, the quicker you’ll learn!

Ready to promote your epic event? It's time to look into ticketing!

Have more questions? Feel free to speak with a human at Humanitix!